With the expansion of the information age, people are adopting new and improved technologies at a rapid pace. Many of these technologies involve various electronic devices having user interfaces or graphical displays. Such displays are rendered on all types of electronic devices from big screen televisions to very small screens for wearable computing devices such as smart watches. The display screen size and/or screen resolution of these devices differs significantly from device to device. In addition, many displays present display elements that can be resized by users. For example, display windows may be resized by users.
This ubiquity of devices with different display screen sizes and/or screen resolutions has resulted in significant challenges relating to presenting display elements that are compatible with a variety of devices and/or device sizes. Displaying screen elements that are compatible with multiple different screen sizes and/or resolutions, or in resizable display elements can adversely impact user experience/usability. When a display area is reduced, whether by user resizing or by moving from a larger to a smaller display screen size and/or resolution, the text within the display elements (e.g., button, tab, or icon) may no longer fit within the display. As a result, text strings within the display elements need to be adapted to fit the smaller display area.
To solve this problem, existing technologies are configured to shorten the text strings arbitrarily and/or truncate the text strings. For text string truncation, ellipses are typically added in the middle or at the end of the truncated text to indicate the text has been truncated. But this can and often does make the resulting text incomprehensible, unintuitive, and sometimes even unusable or unsafe for users. In addition, such text reduction difficulties can often occur in translations of text from one language to another. Conventional computer-assisted translations are often obligated to find words that not only optimally translate the source text to the target language, but also fit within the available space of the display elements in which they are presented. This can result in clipped text, non-optimal translations, unintelligible abbreviations, and/or even untranslated or garbled text strings in translated display elements that look bad or even ridiculous in other languages.
For example, the German text string “Gesamtstatus.” meaning “overall status,” may be shortened to “Gemsamt . . . ” (“Overall”) using truncation. “Gemsamt . . . ” does not help with user comprehension of the truncated term or phrase. A much better modification that would require the same amount of space in the display element would be to use abbreviations such as “G.Status” or “Ges.Status”.